this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2024
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I occasionally see love for niche small distros, instead of the major ones...

And it just seems to me like there's more hurdles than help when it comes to adopting an OS whose users number in the hundreds or dozens. I can understand trying one for fun in a VM, but I prefer sticking to the bigger distros for my daily drivers since the they'll support more software and not be reliant on upstream sources, and any bugs or other issues are more likely to be documented abd have workarounds/fixes.

So: What distro do you daily drive and why? What drove you to choose it?

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[–] bsergay@discuss.online 14 points 2 months ago (11 children)

I daily drive secureblue; or, to be more precise, its bluefin-main-userns-hardened image.

"Why?", you ask. Because security is my number one priority.

I dismiss other often mentioned hardened systems for the following reasons:

  • Qubes OS; my laptop doesn't satisfy its hardware requirements. Otherwise, this would have been my daily driver.
  • Kicksecure; primary reason would be how it's dependent on backports for security updates.
  • Tails; while excellent for protection against forensics, its security model is far from impressive otherwise. It's not really meant as a daily driver for general use anyways.
  • Spectrum OS; heavily inspired by Qubes OS and NixOS, which is a big W. Unfortunately, it's not ready yet.
[–] deuleb_biezelbob@programming.dev 2 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] bsergay@discuss.online 4 points 2 months ago

Whonix is an OS exclusively meant to be used within a VM; at least, until Whonix-Host is released. Therefore, I didn't include it as it's not actually competing within the same space; as it can be run on any of the aforementioned systems within a VM. Finally, it's worth noting that by its own documentation, it's desirable to do so with Qubes OS.

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